Tomás gripped his own arm and rubbed the hair from his skin. “Milagros,” he whispered.
The miner wiped his eyes. “I don’t believe I mentioned her name.”
Tomás blinked. “It i-is my mother’s.”
As Uncle Tomás recounts this to me, I see the realization grow in him as it did then for his father. It’s as if he is processing for the first time the shock of the revelation. As if, in articulating this piece of their history, it’s become real. I watch his pupils contract and glow as the traffic light overhead turns green. His cigarette hangs loose between his index and middle fingers and teeters in the breeze.
I understand now my abuelos’ attention to discipline. Neither had known any place other than their homeland, and then here they were in Manhattan, where they could not speak the language o
